What with many of Asia’s countries still not quite having reached first-world status yet, many companies in the region can be a bit slow to adopt new technologies. Yet there’s one innovation that Asian firms can’t seem to jump on fast enough – Big Data.

The majority of Asian businesses have so far scoffed at the idea of migrating to the cloud, but a good number of them are already employing Big Data analytics to boost their bottom line, according to a new report from The Economist’s intelligence unit, which recently surveyed several hundred Asian companies.

It’s worth taking the time to read the full report, but we’ve provided a short commentary to illustrate just how popular Big Data and analytics are in Asia, and how the technology is being used.

The following chart shows the popularity of modern computing technologies and how widely they’ve been adopted by different key sectors in Asia. Of particular note is that Big Data collection and analytics is far more popular than any other IT trend at the moment – more companies in Asia are using Big Data than they are social media, software-as-a-service, and even IT security.

The second chart takes a look at how Asian companies are implementing Big Data. Not surprisingly, the Construction/Real estate, Healthcare and Energy sectors are rapidly embracing Big Data as a tool to help improve profitability, reduce operational costs and offset rising labor costs, among other uses. More eye-opening perhaps is the Asian financial sector’s stubborn reluctance to adopt Big Data. According to the Economist, financial sector companies are the least likely to employ data analytics no matter what the purpose it’s intended for.